Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - N-T-AUTONOMY (Non-Territorial Autonomy as Minority Protection in Europe: An Intellectual and Political History of a Travelling Idea, 1850-2000)

Teaser

N-T-Autonomy’s overarching objective is to provide a new understanding of how the protection of national minorities was thought and implemented in the era of nationalism.Since the mid of the 19th century we have seen three different approaches to manage national diversity:...

Summary

N-T-Autonomy’s overarching objective is to provide a new understanding of how the protection of national minorities was thought and implemented in the era of nationalism.
Since the mid of the 19th century we have seen three different approaches to manage national diversity: First, national rights can be organised around the individual and equal citizen. Second, national rights can be granted to autonomous territorial units, where a national minority might form the local majority population. And third, minority rights can be granted to collective bodies, which unite persons of a common ethno-national affiliation, wherever they might live in the country. This means, that the legal entity is neither the individual nor a territory but the national group per se. These collective bodies manage the cultural affairs of their group autonomously. As this third approach is based on a person’s belonging to a collectivity, and not on a person’s place of residence, it has been labelled non-territorial autonomy.

Work performed

1) All team members intensively collected printed sources available either in Vienna or in digital format.
2) First research trips to archives in Budapest, Prague, Munich, Moscow and Tallinn.
3) Aava and Adorjáni successfully passed the obligatory presentation of their PhD project – largely overlapping with WP 2 and 5 – in front of the faculty committee at the University of Vienna.
4) The intensive bi-weekly seminars profoundly deepened the team’s apprehension of the manifold dimensions of non-territorial autonomy.
5) Adorjáni, Battis, and Kuzmany produced early drafts for articles and Kuzmany one monograph chapter; guest researcher Korolov finalised his NTA-related monograph.
6) N-T-Autonomy raised the attention for the study of non-territorial autonomy among the academic community via multiple presentations of the project in its entirety or in parts at international conferences, lectures at scholarly institutions, and the project website.
7) N-T-Autonomy members joined the COST Action “European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network” and add to this very normatively designed network a critical historical perspective.

Final results

This project thus constitutes the first full-length study of a central issue in the history of minority protection. It brings together the history of the Habsburg Empire and interwar Europe, European legal history, nationalism studies, and contemporary history and applies them from a transnational perspective. It analyses non-territorial autonomy not only as an evolving multigenerational concept but also, and more crucially, as a set of implemented policies in the twentieth century. It marries theoretical writings of the time with case studies from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from pan-European institutions of minority protection. While the conferral of rights to national minority communities by means of the rights of individual members or through the allocation of territorial autonomy have been widely researched, the third route, through non-territorial autonomy, has received very little attention in the study of nationalism. We will show that elements of non-territorial autonomy have been far more often considered and applied between 1850 and today than previously acknowledged. While this is not a normative project intending to promote non-territorial autonomy as a political tool, our historical research resonates with the lively present-day discussions on how to deal with national conflicts. Following the concept’s evolutionary arc over time and space, and by critically evaluating its radically different applications, this project will have a strong impact on our understanding of how states and societies have tried to deal with national diversity and minority rights.

Website & more info

More info: https://ntautonomy.oeaw.ac.at/en/.